Triple the misery: MLB’s labor woes threaten third spring
DAVID BRANDT AP Sports Writer
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MESA, Ariz. (AP) — It’s a moment Brandon Bajema relishes each year — receiving the email notification that Chicago Cubs tickets for spring training games in Arizona are about to go on sale.
The 2022 version came a couple weeks ago. It popped up on his computer screen and he stared at it for a moment.
“For the first time, I dismissed it,” Bajema said. “That hurt. I love baseball.”
The mood for Major League Baseball fans like Bajema is a little glum these days as the players’ union and owners continue to bicker over finances. The owners locked out the players on Dec. 2 and unless an agreement between the two sides is reached soon, the spring training schedule is in trouble. The first games are slated for Feb. 26.
Spring training games might not count in the official standings, but they certainly count for the pocketbooks of business owners in Arizona and Florida. They’re also a much-anticipated destination for fans like Bajema, who come for the warm sunshine and the laid-back atmosphere.
Fans don’t just buy baseball tickets when they come to Arizona. They stay at hotels, eat at restaurants, play golf in nearly perfect weather and hang out at the bars and shops in Old Town Scottsdale. Thanks to baseball and spring break for students, March is usually a big time of year for tourism in both Arizona and Florida.
But for the third straight year, at least some of that revenue is threatened.
“It’s a big deal for Arizona on so many levels,” Cactus League executive director Bridget Binsbacher said. “We’re obviously not part of (MLB’s) discussions, so we’re just focusing on what we can control. But after the last three years with all the circumstances we’ve been dealing with, the Cactus League, our stakeholders and partners and everyone is ready to have a regular season again.
“We worry about the impact.”
There’s never a good time for a sport to have a labor stoppage, but 2022 would be particularly brutal for a baseball world that’s still in the midst of a COVID-19-induced slowdown. There were no fans allowed at parks during the regular season in 2020 and many parks had limited attendance limits for sizable chunks of the 2021 season.
Spring training sites were similarly affected. The sport shut down because of COVID-19 on March 12, 2020, which was a little more than halfway through that year’s spring schedule and cancelled more than two weeks of games. The 2021 schedule was played in full, but attendance was limited.
Now that it’s 2022, fans are hungry for normalcy.
Lisa Goularte — who is the vice president for marketing and sales at Sports Marketing USA — helps organize trips for San Francisco Giants fans each spring to Scottsdale, which is where the Giants train.
If the games are played, she said fans are ready.
“We’re seeing a huge pent-up demand,” Goularte said. “2020 was obviously cut short and last year was limited, so sales for this season have been really, really strong. We’ve been really pleased.”
The numbers aren’t completely clear yet, but there’s no doubt COVID-19 hit the spring training industry hard in 2020 and 2021.
A study from Arizona State University found that the Cactus League’s season generated an estimated economic impact of $363.6 million in 2020 before the shutdown in mid-March, which was down nearly $300 million from the estimated $644.2 million generated in 2018. There was no data for 2021 because the study is done every other year.
In Grapefruit League territory, Bert Parsley opened a 72,000-square foot restaurant and event space, the Twisted Fork, steps from Florida’s Charlotte County Sports Complex in September 2020 hoping to generate big business off Tampa Bay Rays spring training games and the Charlotte Stone Crabs’ Class A minor league games.
He’s yet to see what kind of business the space can do on a normal game day. The 2021 spring training slate was held with restricted capacities due to COVID-19, and the Stone Crabs were contracted and folded before the season started.
“It would be brutal,” Parsley said about missing 2022 spring training. “March is our best month of the year.
“It’s big for us. The park is directly behind us. We actually have balls fly into our parking lot, we’re that close. Last year, it was still our busiest month, and they had some pretty rigid COVID restrictions for baseball game attendees. So their attendances were way down for the games, but we still killed it.”
Bajema — the Cubs fan — lives in Northern California, about 60 miles south of Sacramento and makes the 11-hour drive to Arizona with his wife and two daughters. They have a third child on the way. One reason he recently bought a van is it would make the 700-mile trek more comfortable for his family each March.
But this year’s trip is very much in jeopardy, even if he hasn’t given up hope.
Like many fans, Bajema understands there’s a business aspect to MLB and that the union vs. owners dynamic is part of that landscape. It’s just hard to be overly sympathetic after more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m not rich, I spend my hard-earned money to go to these games,” Bajema said. “Let’s pull it together, let’s figure it out. It’s all about the money and there’s so much greed.”
Craig Ruttle
MLB and the MLB Players Association met in-person Monday in Manhattan for more than two hours, their second bargaining session since the lockout started in December and the most substantive talks yet. The league made a proposal to the players' union via Zoom on Jan. 13. Monday was viewed as the MLBPA's counter. They're also meeting again Tuesday, which represents progress.
David Zalubowski
The MLB side included Rockies owner Dick Monfort, who's the chairman of baseball's labor policy committee, as well as deputy commissioner Dan Halem, executive vice president Morgan Sword and senior vice president Patrick Houlihan. Lead negotiator Bruce Meyer and free agent reliever Andrew Miller represented the MLBPA.
Matt Slocum
MLBPA changed its tune on two things it hopes will spur momentum in talks: time before free agency is reached and the amount of money funneled to small-market teams (like the Pirates) via revenue sharing.
MLB players can currently become free agents after six years. The union had been arguing for a system that got some there in five depending on age — 30 1/2 to start, then eventually reaching 29 1/2 .
The union had previously asked that the revenue-sharing process was decreased by $100 million, but on Monday it dropped that ask to $30 million.
LM Otero
Tough to say, although a return to the bargaining table 24 hours later obviously isn't a bad thing. It's also important to consider context or the rotten relationship that exists between these two parties; common ground or positive vibes are hard to find.
Furthermore, the owners have certain things that they've described as non-starters in negotiations: any tweaks to the revenue-sharing model, plus how soon players can reach free agency and the timeline to arbitration.
Accepting the current system for free agency is a concession. The union's adjusted revenue-sharing figure was, too, although the owners might not care if they're truly unwilling to discuss a change here.
MLB players can currently become free agents after six years. The union had been arguing for a system that got some there in five depending on age — 30 1/2 to start, then eventually reaching 29 1/2 .
The union had previously asked that the revenue-sharing process was decreased by $100 million, but on Monday it dropped that ask to $30 million.
Sue Ogrocki
A lot, frankly.
Crossing free agency off the list, there's currently a sizable gap when it comes to how the two sides view the Competitive Balance Tax (or CBT) threshold.
It's currently $210 million. Owners have proposed a system starting at $214 million and reaching $220 million over a five-year period. The players are asking for $245 million. This alone tells you how far off these two groups can be.
Another key issue is minimum salary. The union wants to take the current number ($570,500) to $775,000 and $875,000 by 2026. Owners want to start at $600,000 and have it split into thirds: under a year of service, between one and two years and more than two, the latter two earning $50,000 and $100,000 more.
Those numbers, in theory, would jump $10,000 annually to reach $640,000/$690,000/$740,000 in 2026. None of this has been seriously discussed, which matters because minimum salary has a bigger impact than you might think.
Say a different minimum salary applies to 10 players per team. A jump from the current figure to, say, $650,000, would mean $79,500 per player, $795,000 per team and $23,850,000 across all 30 clubs.
Ross D. Franklin
This might be the wackiest topic discussed, in that it seems MLB wants to give some, but how the owners have done that is funky.
Service time in MLB, loosely, works like this: The first two years are team-controlled, where clubs set salaries a hair over the league minimum. The final three are decided by arbitration. The issue is the third one, where the top 22% of players in that class achieve what's called "Super 2" status and earn a fourth whack at arbitration.
Clubs manipulating service time to prevent this has long been a thorny topic, especially in Pittsburgh, and it's something the MLBPA would like to improve in the next CBA. The issue becomes how to do that.
Owners have proposed a formula-based system netting increased compensation for players with between two and three years of service time. They've also discussed a system that could net draft picks if teams place a top prospect on the opening day roster and that player thrives.
Teams would could earn a first-round pick if said player won Rookie of the Year or finished in the top three in MVP or Cy Young voting, a second-rounder for thresholds below that. One issue: Whose top 100 list are we using? Another: award voters might determine whether a team gets a first-round pick? Odd.
The formula-based system has also gained little traction. MLB previously offered to have salaries determined by WAR, and that was quickly scrapped. A concern over this latest ploy is that better compensation for players with between two and three years of service time would ultimately eliminate arbitration — something the union would like to avoid.
Some good ideas, sure, but plenty of work ahead.
LM Otero
Amazingly, yes. MLB has agreed to remove draft-pick compensation from free agents, which the union thinks could spur more offseason activity. The sides also seem aligned on having the designated hitter in both leagues and creating a draft lottery, though they differ on how to structure the latter.
To this point, the owners want to limit the lottery to three teams, with participants ineligible to draft that high in three consecutive seasons. Players want the draft lottery to expand to eight, a move they believe will at least partially address tanking.
Seems both sides are OK expanding the postseason, with owners lobbying for 14 teams and the players saying they will go to 12 — but play more games to try and match the revenue generated from a 14-game system. Advertising patches on uniforms are another thing where a solution seemingly exists.
Ashley Landis
Here's the crazy part of this whole thing. The DH has been the only on-field issue they've discussed. Nothing about pace of play, robot umps or shifts. No talk about tackier baseballs, roster limits, the use of replay or legitimately trying to grow the sport, either.
They'll hopefully get there, but neither side seems appropriately concerned with things that really do matter to fans. Would be nice to see them figure out the economic issues quicker and then concentrate on this stuff.
Charles Rex Arbogast
Baseball has endured eight work stoppages between 1972-1995 but none since.
The backdrop here is unique, too. Teams have been spending less and less on players, dragging the total number of salary dollars down to a level not seen since 2015 (a little over $4 billion). And while that won't net sympathy from regular folks, it has only made things more contentious between players and owners, who have received an increasingly larger piece of the financial pie.
That said, everyone was affected by COVID-19, which shortened the 2020 season to 60 games and delivered to owners virtually no gate revenue.
Owners contend they incurred around $3 billion in operating losses due to the pandemic-shortened season, and while it would be impossible to independently verify that figure, this much is true: Missing more games would not be good for business.
Ashley Landis
This part has been sometimes overblown. Spring training is scheduled to start on Feb. 16, so an agreement would have to come in the next two weeks to hit that deadline.
It's also entirely possible for spring training to be shortened. As long as they figure something out by late February, it should provide enough time for everyone to get to Florida and Arizona, clear COVID protocols and for pitchers to build up enough arm strength for a March 31 opening day.
Ashley Landis
FILE - Fans take a photo in front of the Chicago Cubs Spring Training sign before a spring training baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers Thursday, March 25, 2021, in Mesa, Ariz. Spring training games might not count in the official standings, but they certainly count for the pocketbooks of business owners in Arizona and Florida. They're also a much-anticipated destination for fans who come for the warm sunshine and the laid-back atmosphere. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis, File)
